Sondock: Wrong way thinking on LIE

Eric Alexander is dead wrong to suggest that life would be better without the Long Island Expressway (“Imagining a Long Island without the LIE,” LIBN, July 25). To the contrary, Long Island needs more highways and greater automotive mobility – not less – to grow and prosper in a competitive national economy.

A creative solution to Long Island’s mobility problem would be to transform and upgrade all parkways that prohibit commercial vehicles into expressways.

Expressways provide more flexibility for transportation and land use.

Certainly, Long Island’s commuter rail system is an enormous asset that is underutilized and poorly maintained by ineffective and inefficient government ownership. The LIRR would be greatly improved, providing enhanced benefits for Long Island, if sold and transformed into a competitive private enterprise.

Similarly, Long Island’s archaic land-use system desperately needs to be transformed into a regional zoning authority without the Balkanization of 111 town and village zoning districts that stifle economic growth, promote government corruption, raise property taxes and increase the cost of living and doing business.

Long Island has the best geography in the United States and should be the most prosperous

region in the nation, if not for tyrannical Home Rule and local fiefdoms. Less government constraints and less burdensome regulations and restrictions – and a freer real estate market – are the solutions.